This book is focused on the key elements of telephony and the migration to VOIP – primarily as a cost saving measure. The first 2/3 of the book deal with the VOIP technology – as an adjunct to and eventual replacement for traditional (legacy) telephony. By the 2/3 point, the author is talking about cost analysis, benefits and justification.

I would more likely title this book “VOIP for management”. This is not a put-down or insult, as the book’s primary objective is to educate the mostly non-technical person on what VOIP is, and how it might best fit into an existing picture, and one moving forward.

Being primarily technical myself, this book was good as a preliminary introduction to a subject that I wasn’t familiar with – but I immediately moved on to the O’Reilly books on the subject – “Switching to VOIP” by Ted Wallingford and “Asterisk” (Leif Madsen, et al). Someone who is responsible for managing such a transition would find it much more useful than I did.

Also, Tech PRose was kind enough to add Signal Noise as a favorite telecom blog.

This patent, and several like it, weren’t necessarily held by inventors, as I learned a years back, is not at all uncommon.  Patent investors, who are typically intellectual property attorneys, underwrite the investments in patents like the C2 one, and then derive income from their ownership over the patent certificate, either by licensing technology, by selling the patent, or by suing for damages on infringement of the patent inclusive of the intellectual property.

I know this particular patent and the family of about two dozen dangerously similar patents because I was retained by a San Francisco law firm for about six months trying to help them sort the patents out and translate them into plain-English for some white-haired, Harvard-educated attorney (or judge) to understand.  I still have a copy of the patent sitting in my drawer.

The real problem with this family of patents, which’ve been issued to everybody from C2 to Verizon to Joe Six Pack, is that they all overlap significantly in terms of the processes or inventions they describe.  What’s worse, they all describe the same essential process of packetizing audible information and transmitting over a non-circuit-switched network.  Indeed, these patents aren’t just similar. When you boil them down to their essentials, they’re largely identical.

And this is one problem the Electronic Frontier Foundation is fighting.  If the Patent and Trademark Office is Issuing patents that cover the same process or technology theory to different parties at roughly the same time (all of these patents were either pending or granted from 1988 until roughly 2003), it really makes you wonder if the patent review teams at PTO are operating in independent vacuums, or if the processes described really are too technical for the PTO to comprehend.

The EFF would probably say that the PTO hasn’t been particularly effective since The Flying Nun was popular.  And, to the degree I find it practical, I agree with the EFF.  But I disagree with their operating theory that patent law is more flawed than effective because it stifles innovation.  The GNU/Open Source movement is the shrill cry of software populism, and I appreciate that deeply, even if I don’t believe software “wants to be free”. Haha.

And for all its heroism, Open Source is also the linchpin of poor quality assurance, the opposite thinking of service level agreements, and the lasting symbol of a sort of techno-hippyism that has lost its way while the corporate world, where all this technology is utilized, took GNU’s good ideas and left its mission behind.   That is, for every stifled innovation credited to the PTO, I can name two that occurred because of ownership of intellectual property by motivate, equipped organizations like Microsoft and IBM.   The EFF and the Open Source community are less equipped and less motivated to innovate because their feet aren’t being held to the bottom line fire.

The PTO just needs to get better at understanding inventions.  My idea, put them in the hands of motivated companies that can do something with them, and get the attorneys out of the patent investment business.  If they want to profit from innovation, let them buy stock like the rest of us.

To coincide with T-Mobile’s announcement earlier this week of the availability of the G1 mobile phone in March 2009, a German version of Truphone Anywhere for Android is available and will be the first native language multi-communications application in the Android Market in Germany and Austria when it launches at CeBIT 2009.

As well as being able to make low-cost international voice calls, Truphone customers can also easily instant-message their friends across a variety of networks including MSN, Yahoo!, Google Talk and Twitter from within one Android application. Customers can also call friends anywhere in the world on Google Talk for the price of a local call, and similarly will soon will be able to instant-message and call their friends on Skype.

Truphone is also available on the Apple iPhone, the Apple iPod touch, Blackberry and Nokia devices.

All that above together with the new features introduced with Skype 2.8 for Mac made me wonder: can Skype ever become the next big thing in the field of “social networking” rather than “only” the most popular VoIP service ever? Let’s try to analyze how far Skype is from this “big picture”.

Users are not certainly a problem for Skype. With over 200M users (not active, but downloads), it’s not far from the huge 150M active users of Facebook. What Facebook is missing at this time is a powerful desktop client. Despite the world of consumer services is moving to the “cloud”, having an always on client on your PC has many benefits, such as being always available and experiencing a realtime interaction with your friends.

I don’t know if a desktop client is the best place to do social activity management.  The browser is good for what’s it’s good for: rich browsing experiences.  But I don’t want to change the form factor of the IM client just to accomodate a feed list or yet another messaging utility.  Skype needs to stay in the same size and shape it has now: on the right side of my screen, occupying maybe 10% of my real estate.

Plus, the other thing that’s cool about Facebook is that nothing has to be immediate.  The realtime nature of Skype conversations is precisely why I’d sometimes rather communicate on Facebook, or e-mail, etc.  But please read Luca’s post, as it is a really cool idea that warrants deeper inspection.

I mean, do you know anybody who gets hot and bothered about plumbing?

Jeff Pulver, whose own motions to transform his flagship VON expo and publishing operation into a “more than voice” effort seemed to indicate, two years ago, that VoIP has lost its sex appeal.

Is that death? Maybe not, but in this neck of the woods, something is dead when people quit talking about it.  Here in Cleveland, nobody was ever really talking about VoIP, except the partial players like Cisco VARs, and even they had to be careful not to call it “VoIP”.

Interestingly, there’s an obvious correlation between this death and Om Malik’s rant about the pigsty of mediocrity in which the U.S. business world now sits.  This is the best piece Om has EVER written, no question.  And it has almost nothing to do with VoIP technology. Instead, it deals with today’s craptacularly perfect storm of of crummy debt, bad business decisions, over-reaching government and under-achieving American companies.

The mediocrity and “it’s good enough” attitude has been at the heart of VoIP disappearing from the excitement radar.  Early pure-plays didn’t innovate useful services when the window of opportunity was open. Vonage didn’t offer an open soft phone, just as Skype never made a SIP proxy available to their users. Two huge mistakes.  But there’s more.

The cable companies insisted on bundling data, TV, and phone service, and then didn’t differentiate their phone service from that of the existing LECs.  So, not only couldn’t you get dedicated data service and choose your own voice provider, but you also got stuck with substandard phone service to boot.

Equipment makers insisted on asinine licensing structures (are you reading this, Cisco and Avaya?) for the privilege of using their “good enough” solutions, while scrappy, VoIP-only startups were sidelined by the general lack of decent broadband access.

It’s like all the elements of the telecom industry revolution were there–just at the wrong times. Broadband became pervasive, and just as it was getting unbundled (thanks Congress), the competing network operators went belly up, so ASPs and hosted voice providers, having sunk millions and millions into excellent new offerings, had no way to get their services to the masses.

Those that did survive did so because some insider bank gave them a loan to keep the engine running just a little longer, and then a little longer, and then a little longer. And when banker keeps pumping non-revenue dollars into out a cash-losing business, the banker eventually comes for his money. When the banker can’t collect, the treasury secretary buys his debt.  When the treasury secretary loses all his money, he prints more.

Then, suddenly, a gallon of milk costs $20.

That’s mediocrity from start to finish.

This is the way the VoIP world ends
Not with a bang, but a whimper

Pulver pretty-much said this two years ago: VoIP is dead.  It became the “draw commodity” I hoped it wouldn’t, due to its promise and unique ability to transform the state of the telecom world.  But the politics of the device makers, carriers, and regulators proved to much, and VoIP became just another “more of the same” transport mechanism. It’s there if you need it–there if you need to draw on it, but not uniquely compelling.

Here are the ten things that prove VoIP is dead:

1. Vonage still hasn’t turned the corner. Further burying themselves in debt (what bank took THAT risk in this crummy credit market, seriously?), there’s just no way out for the pure-play provider.

2. Alec Saunders declared VoIP dead and he has some good reasons why.  (OK, Jeff Pulver, we’ll believe you next time.)

3. Everywhere you look, former VoIP honchos are turning to social media applications as a focus area–from Jeff Pulver to Ken Camp to myself. It’s a trend. Social media is where the opportunity for innovation in unified communications still exists.

4. End-to-end VoIP is never going to be a reality, at least not not under the current competitive structure for telephone companies.

5. VoIP is a tool of application delivery. It does not differentiate the service the way it used to.

6. VoIP companies offering really cool features should’ve made deals to make those features a part of pure-play companies’ service.  This would’ve compelled adoption and brought both types of companies closer to the black. Instead, we saw no joint ventures between pureplays like BroadVoice and “oh that’s neat” players like TalkPlus.   The result–VoIP pure plays were no different from the bundled phone service provided by cablecos and telcos, and the public couldn’t see what the big deal about VoIP was.

7. I stopped consulting on business VoIP some time this year.  In most of the United States, the demand for VoIP in the SMB sector is just not there (despite all the manufactured hype about it).

8. Hosted VoIP PBX as a business model died on the vine. It’s probably not going to get much bigger than it is today. This isn’t the hosted players’ faults–it’s the fault of our sorry North American telecom infrastructure.

9. VoIP today is an infrastructure networking skill, no longer demanding the high pay of years past. Get a Cisco certification in voice and you might have some sort of earning premium, but with the slow-down, I doubt it.  Bottom line is, like ethernet and TCP/IP, if you don’t understand unified communications and you claim to be a network engineer, you’re screwed.

10. Cisco’s vision of unified communications sucks and they’ve foisted it upon the business world, scaring many SMBs away from VoIP altogether and elbowing open technologies like SIP out of the large business space.

10. Darla Mack.  If you’re a Nokia nut, there’s no better destination.  The self-proclaimed “mobile diva”, Darla tries just about everything with her Nokia phones.

9. Rich Tehrani. The brawn and brains of TMC, Rich has been in the industry as long as any of us, and his blog is a great mix of gadget news and insider industry info.

8. Alec Saunders.  Alec’s in the trenches daily as a VoIP visionary (he declared VoIP dead this morning) and application developer, so he’s usually weeks or months ahead of trends.

7. Om Malik and his band of creative cohorts. It’s pretty hard to ignore the guy that breaks just about every telecom industry rumor 24 hours before it turns into news.  Some of his underling’s stories are habitually wacky (obsessed with all this overstated carbon economy BS, for example), but generally,
Om’s is one of the best blogs around.

6. Ken Camp and Sheryl Breuker.  I’ve been in the Ken Camp camp for years now. Now that Sheryl’s on board with Mr. Camp, they’ve begun leading the way in a movement I expect will become the norm in 2009: VoIP people concentrating on social applications instead of VoIP.  That’s my plan anyway, so I’ll be keeping tabs on Ken and Sheryl.

5. Esme Vos.  No longer the lone female in my list (thanks to Darla and Sheryl), Esme is primarily known as a event/expo organizer who concentrates on municipal WiFi, having founded the MuniWireless expos. But she’s got something to say about software, Apple, Nokia, publishing, and a bunch of other stuff I care about.

4. Andy Abramson. A keen observer and predicter, and a new media relations specialist by day, Andy has more contacts than any two other people.

3. Phone Boy.  Dameon “Phone Boy” Welch-Abernathy: the only guy I know with a name longer than my own.  His blogging habit is better than mine, too.   He mainly blogs about gadgets, Nokia stuff, and social networking.

2. Jeff Pulver. Like Camp, Breuker, and others, Pulver is leading the retreat from VoIP charge to social media through video and social web applications.  I love reading Jeff’s blog. He posts a ton of photos and track logs.

1. Martin Geddes.  He doesn’t post often, but it’s always worth the read.  Also, this guy pulls no punches. Just as I aspire never to do, Martin Geddes never sets off the the bullshit detector.

1. Cisco’s brand has a better reputation. The Cisco name means one thing: networking.  When your name is identified with your core competency more than any other name, it means you make good products, and have done so for a long time.  Avaya, on the other hand, has a name that is new since the late nineties or early 2000s, a name that was cooked up as a way of shaking the legacy image of Lucent/AT&T.  But, as the old saying goes, if you put crap in a pretty box with a bow, it’s still crap.   Of course we know that Avaya’s products aren’t crap, but, in hindsight, and setting aside trademark law for a moment, would it not have been better to stick with the name Lucent?

2. Cisco has a more qualified sales channel. Cisco’s resellers are data people, many of whom have also been supporting software applications for decades.  Avaya’s resellers are “phone guys”.  Two entirely different kinds of folks. Software people understand the needs of users.  Phone guys often don’t.  The reason is thus: software can be made to do whatever the user wants, however telephone systems, a la TDM, always had a rigid feature-set that didn’t evolve around innovative user ideas.  So Cisco resellers, having sold and supported software for a long time along Cisco’s gear, are often more experienced at tailoring solutions.

3. Cisco spends more on product placement than Avaya does on payroll.  OK, maybe not THAT much, but you get the picture. Everywhere you look, Cisco’s products are on the screen and in print.  If you were an alien from outer space watching American TV or movies for the first time, you would think that every phone in America was a Cisco 7970.

4. Cisco, with the Bells’ help, convinced the public that SIP is some kind of new, experimental, risky protocol. Of course, nothing could be less true.  But, since SIP holds the key to creating interoperability between all UC telephony platforms, Cisco has been in no hurry to hype it.  Not to mention all the licensing fees they’d be giving back if their customers began to abandon the Skinny protocol.  Avaya, now’s your chance.  Hype SIP’s scalability and global compatibility before Cisco grabs another 15% of your market share and converts those endpoints to SCCP.

5. Cisco has succeeded in defining the “standard features” of a VoIP phone setup. This despite the fact that those features aren’t all that different from a traditional TDM setup, and despite the fact that there are actually fewer features and less flexibility in CallManager than there is in Avaya’s solution.  Avaya, if you want to win this skirmish, open up your media server and let users create their own features–not by selling them expensive call-center add-ons (that would be Cisco’s approach), but by just including EVERY piece of call-center software in EVERY distribution.  You’ll be surprised how quickly customers flock to you.  Remember that you’re locking customers in to a 12 – 15 year platform investment.  If you GIVE them the flexibility and power that Cisco will only SELL them, they’ll come.

2008: the harbinger year for a revolution in the telecom industry?  No, not exactly.  Nor was 2008 the year of action of for end-to-end VoIP.  But 2008 was a good year for me.   I more or less quit consulting on VoIP, as the majority of clients who need help with VoIP are too small for my firm, and the top 5% of clients available in the field are too big for it.  The in-betweeners are dominated by a group of recruiters who beat each other up and submit VoIP candidates to internal employment positions I can’t be interested in.

Twitter was an interesting subject, retrospectively, in 2008.  On one hand it’s dying at the hands of Facebook. On the other hand, it’s got so much vigor and a following, too.  Twitter is one of those things that, even as an objectively expert witness on the subject of social media, I still struggle to grasp.  I wonder what the sex appeal is, minus all the fluff of a LinkedIn or a Facebook, of Twitter.

Sony launched a social network for the PS3.  The world essentially yawned, already beaten to death with the concept as previously implemented by things like Second Life, Sims Online, and World of Warcraft.  Now, if Nintendo had launched a social network along the lines of Animal Crossing–now that might be cool.

I received a pool table and air hockey table for Christmas and have nowhere to put either of them. At the moment my basement is full.  My son wants me to move the foozball table to the living room. A-hem. Kids take a while to develop decorating taste, I guess. Maybe in 2009.

The other day I had a discussion going on twitter. The discussion sort of detoured and something came up about how we can’t expect people who are celebrities to engage us. My response, though directed toward that topic was really a bigger answer and one that I live daily.

Many people live their lives accepting life as a social hierarchy. They don’t ask questions and don’t have expectations. I’m not like that. I live daily attempting to live in the here and now and engage my larger community. Instead of just accepting life as it is, accepting that people won’t engage me I always ask the question, “Why not?” “Why aren’t I worthy of engagement?” Why should I just expect my opinion or my thoughts are not important enough for someone to pay attention to them?

I have a good example of why my perspective is valid.

Today Ken sent me a message and said Unified-Communications is on Alltop. Why does that matter? Well, not to toot my own horn, but I sent Guy Kawasaki a note on twitter and asked him why it wasn’t there. We proceeded to send messages back and forth ending in email and me researching links for Unified-Communications for them to put on Alltop.

The answer then to my why not question is simple. “Indeed! Why not?”

Sometimes it feels like stretching upward and outward into the social status quo may feel like beating your head against the wall. I know this primarily because I’m a salesperson as well as a consultant. I do have to find customers, after all. This is why I spent 2 1/2 hours at a council meeting tonight trying to get a misguided city I.T. appropriations ordinance overturned in my 60,000-person town tonight instead of watching the Browns get spanked on Monday Night Football, which I’d much rather do.

Needless to say, like the Browns trying to cope with the superior Philadelphia Eagles, I went to this meeting expecting my pleading to fail, but hoping I could convince enough people of the silliness of the proposed ordinance that maybe, just maybe, I might have a chance of getting the vote to fail.

Well, it’s 17 to 3 Eagles in the second quarter, and as I’ve just arrived home from the council meeting, put my kids to bad, and cracked open a Miller Lite, I’m feeling like the Browns.  I got my butt kicked tonight. The measure passed by 3 votes.  I only got one Nay vote I wasn’t expecting.  So I lost and lost hard.

But it doesn’t always have to be like that.  And I was encouraged by Sheryl’s post, because it reminded me that I had a very similar experience a few years ago.

I had just been laid off from a very cushy job as an I.T. manager for a construction firm, and I was pretty upset about it. Long before I’d ever entertained the notion of surviving (forget about thriving) as a consultant, I’d been a full-time I.T. manager, and the job meant almost everything to me. I loved the company, the people, and the work.  It was devastating to me when I lost my job.

A few weeks prior to being terminated, I’d been looking for books to help me with a VoIP project I was working on for the company. I turned immediately to O’Reilly Media, whose epic masterpiece Sendmail was probably the only reason I was able to succeed in the I.T. field back when I lived in Detroit.  O’Reilly didn’t have a book about Voice over IP, so I thought to myself, who can I e-mail to find out when O’Reilly’s VoIP book would be published?  Who better than the publisher himself?

At the time, Tim O’Reilly was an absolute icon. Perhaps more of a rebel than now, Tim O’Reilly was the freewheeling open-source fanatic that I knew I could count on to publish just the right VoIP book, and I was certain he had one up his sleeve.  So, while still employed with the excavating contractor (the fifth-largest in the country), I e-mailed Tim a quick note to ask him when such a book would be forthcoming.

A week went by, then another week. And I thought, bah, the guy’s busy. I understand.

Lo and behold, one day prior to my termination, I get an e-mail in my inbox from Tim referring me to one of his networking editors. They informed me that they hadn’t identified an author as of yet to write the O’Reilly VoIP book.  Me being an English hack (I spent many hours writing poetry and short fiction instead of attending chemsitry class in high school), I volunteered myself to write the book, expecting Tim and Mike Loukides, the editor, to turn me down almost immediately.

But that’s precisely the opposite of what happened. Not only did I get a contract to write the book, but it provided me with much-needed income during my time of unemployment and the extremely difficult divorce that followed. The book went on to be the most successful book of its subject (aside from O’Reilly’s Asterisk-specific book, which came out about a year later), but I also got a second book contract and began to roll with a whole new group of folks. My first book, Switching to VoIP, had its seventh printing two weeks ago.

My status as an honest-to-goodness thought leader was secured, despite my periodically goofy thought patterns (ask anybody who reads this blog regularly, LAWL), and I was able to transition that thought leadership status into a consulting business, of which I recently purchased the sole stake.

The point of this story is that, if I wouldn’t have the mustard seed portion of faith required to e-mail Tim O’Reilly when I was an absolute NOBODY, I would’ve missed out on an awful lot. Today, I get to say I know folks like Ken Camp, Jeff Pulver, Alec Saunders, and Andy Abramson. I get to run my consulting business with an authority and gravitas I would’ve never thought was possible for a poor kid from inner-city Detroit. I started to actually see some of my dreams come true. I could do it.

And then, I realized, I could suddenly do a whole lot more.

So when Sheryl wrote about how she reached across a genuinely invisible social barrier to reach Guy Kawasaki, and got something positive out of the interchange, I totally, totally, totally get where she is coming from. She made a connection that perhaps she didn’t expect to yield much, yet it yielded something very positive indeed.  That’s my story as well.

And you should take this to heart. No matter where you’re at: if you want it, it’s a matter of going out and getting it.

Having the balls. Believing you’re more than what you appear to others to be.

Make those connections. If you’re in a council meeting expecting your business opportunity to be pummeled by a bunch of uninformed politicians, GO ANYWAY.  If you’re the Browns and you’re competing for last place with the dregs of the AFC, go anyway.  Be bold.

People will eventually appreciate it.

The county seat, and home of the college, is the City of Elyria, and tonight I attended a council meeting during which the 11 council members were deciding whether or not to establish an official I.T. Dept. and increase the number of I.T. staffers from 2 to 7.  Of course, the city is also considering Police and Fire layoffs, so this issue is a natural hot potato.

The vote came up to tonight on Council’s agenda.  So I donned my best charcoal grey suit and purple tie, jotted down five pages of notes assembled from the talks I’ve had with various councilmembers and the city’s two I.T. managers over the last six months, and addressed council in a speech that went 6 minutes over my allotted time.

In my pleading, I wanted to know: where did they come up with 7 staffers as the ideal?

The Mayor responded by telling me, and all present, that the software consultant ACS, a Minneapolis-based firm that specializes in municipal line of business ware, was instrumental in coming up with the 7 number, and so, apparently, was the college. OK.  Free consulting MUST be superior.

The city wants to hire a full-time web developer to work on its 5 web sites–again, while considering laying off public safety officials. The Police Chief was on hand, glock-in-holster, to let Council know that he could cut nothing except people at this point, if asked to shrink his budget.

Haven’t these guys ever heard of Wordpress?  It’s pretty hard to justify a $80k guy when you can get a consultant to do a Parks and Rec template on Joomla for a grand or less.  Not that I would take that sort of work.  But here’s where it got fun:  when I dropped the term, “content management”, I could just FEEL the wind getting sucked out of the room. Nobody had the faintest clue what I was talking about.

And then it dawned on me. Municipalities like Elyria have been left behind.  Little midwestern towns have been convinced that I.T. is what it was 30 years ago: expensive, inflexible, and inaccessible to people with more than 5 grey hairs on their heads.

Another local municipality, North Ridgeville, also in Lorain County, which runs its servers on a certain formerly-dominent networking product that now runs only on Linux, just can’t justify putting out the money to go with Windows and Active Directory, despite 95% of the world having moved to Windows Server some years ago.

How in the bloody heck will I ever be able broach the subject of VoIP with these guys?

These organizations are Tech Hostages, made inept and held to zero progress because their decision makers are committees that spend 39 minutes reading identical ordinance description over and over and over with a chairman saying “first reading” after each iteration.  It’s like listening to paint dry.  No, it’s worse.  I’m very much a democracy supporter, but if we can’t get these folks to innovate in the democratic process, how can we expect them to use technology more fervently, more effectively?

That, dear friends, is the job of Ted Wallingford.  Convince the Midwest that, at least when it comes to the silicon part, it’s OK to emulate Silicon Valley.

This is Brown Minutes and the Heartburn Chuckle all wrapped together. But I can tell you why this telecom crash is occuring. Remember, once an industry is scaled to its max, like the telecom industry, the only way to succeed is to generate profit through new innovations. Merely recycling established ideas with different pricing and bundles may be good for short-term cash grabs but has little to do with the sustainability of long-term profit.  Just ask Yahoo. They’re dying because of that axiom right now.

The Manufacturers

Companies like Cisco and Nortel have done too little to move the VoIP revolution beyond the customer’s demarc, while tradeshow talks about SIP trunking and a spirit of cooperation in using the Internet to replace the PSTN have all been hollow talk designed to please the audience of the day.  True, end-to-end VoIP still isn’t reality unless you’re willing to sit in front of your PC and run Skype.   To say Skype carried out the VoIP vision more successfully than Cisco and Nortel ought to be greatly humbing to those companies, but it’s really true.  Skype got it.  Cisco, Nortel, and Avaya didn’t.

The big manufacturers continue to be the only powers with enough leverage to move the carrier giants away from circuit-switched technology, yet the manufacturer’s own uncertainties about recooping licensing fees and retaining customer-base (through lock-in rather than innovation) have scared them away from issuing the carriers a real challenge: build an all-IP global voice network or we will.

The Carriers

The carriers are firms like AT&T, Windstream, Verizon, BT, and so on.  Their obsession with the billing unit (the almighty minute) has made them helpless to see the possibilities of a software-rich, application-based global ecosystem.  Consequently, the most successful apps to arrive on the carriers’ networks, the ones most embraced by the public, overwhelmingly have one purpose: to steal billable minutes from the carriers. The innovation disappeared and the scrappy new players in the market, the ones with the power to transform the public’s thinking about telecom, instead got stuck doing the same old thing the big telecoms do to put bread on the table: bill minutes.

The Government

In the United States, deregulation under President Clinton in the Telecom Act of 1996 went in all the wrong directions and didn’t do enough to create entrepreneurial freedom in telecom. It failed to recognize that the Internet was going to eclipse the PSTN in terms of consumer participation, and as a result, it positioned the carriers to remain in their highly subsidized comfort zone.

Further mistakes were made when the FCC became distracted by lobbying for Network Neutrality legislation. As with many things, the passage of time revealed that Netnoot was a solution in search of a problem, more often than not.  Apparently nobody at the FCC realized that the free market would provide for the needs of consumers who didn’t want to participate in a 93-octane Internet.  So the FCC spent a lot of time looking at issues that were overstated and geared to bolster the chances of a few admittedly excellent Silicon Valley content startups who didn’t want to get choked out by the carriers.

Shame on us for not recognizing that the carriers are too inept to succeed in the content business anyway. And shame on the FCC for wasting all that energy when they should’ve been looking at ways to encourage greater adoption of end-to-end IP technology.

The Conclusion

So, when you have three willing participants in a massacre, you get a massacre.  The three power players in our industry–boxmakers, regulators, and networkers–are playing the same tune.  Protect revenue by doing nothing. The fruits of that labor are now obvious.  Like the automotive industry, which has a frighteningly similar situation on its hands, the answer now is the same as ten years ago: innovation.  Put on those thinking caps, MIT grads and garage tinkerers. We’ve got an even bigger hole to think our way out of now.

Truphone users will be prompted, at the time they dial an international number, whether or not they’d like to use Truphone to handle the call. Very clever.

Get over it Apple & AT&T.  Consumer choices is how you win (and keep) customers.

Anyway, I’ve summarized what I love about the AA60, and what can be improved:

Pros:

- Recording calls from the web interface. Works great. Recorded calls end up in your voicemail box. Perfect. In-call recording using a dialed code to start and stop, not included.

- Panels can easily be integrated into desktop apps, like the experimental panel I built for my Excel contact sheet using RealBasic’s browser control.  Good stuff.

- No problems with call quality. Works great with Junction Networks IAX and SIP trunks (I’ve tried both but prefer IAX since it’s more firewall-friendly).

- Auto-provisioning is stupid simple.  And Polycom makes some of the best SIP hardphones money can buy. P.S. Polycom seems to be the preferred phone vendor for SwitchVox PBXs.

- Call-logging and reporting is great. There are a variety of built-in traffic reports, CDRs, and an Excel export that works very well.

Cons:

- No IAX endpoint support.  Given how downright simple it is to support IAX in an Asterisk environment like SwitchVox, this is just silly.  Add IAX support, guys. Really.

- The web interface could use a few tweaks. Setting up cascading call groups is tricky, for example. But hey the AA60 is a small business product so it’s hard to complain.

- No redundant power supply or storage (the higher-up model offers both).